


Fourteen

by bomberqueen17



Series: The Lost Kings [10]
Category: Star Wars: Shattered Empire
Genre: Blood and Gore, F/M, Guerrilla Warfare, but if anyone deserves to be it's him, idk guys i kind of made him a gary stu, kes dameron is super badass, kes murders a lot of people in the face i'm not kidding about the warnings, stormtroopers - Freeform, warfare
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-02
Updated: 2017-09-02
Packaged: 2018-12-22 17:56:35
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,347
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11972607
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bomberqueen17/pseuds/bomberqueen17
Summary: Kes completes his first round of training with the Rebel Alliance, and runs his first real missions. He finds out that his childhood prepared him a lot better for it than he'd expected.





	Fourteen

Kes couldn’t tell if Andor was disappointed that he didn’t want to join the Intelligence branch or not. He liked Andor fine, and owed him his life, and was admittedly curious to hear more about his father, but somehow it seemed… too much, maybe, to hear the stories of the mysterious figure whose absence had so haunted his childhood. Especially now that he seemed to be following in the man’s footsteps. It was too much, and he found excuses not to spend too much time with Andor. He wanted to hear the man’s stories, but he didn’t think he was strong enough to absorb them all at once. 

Training occupied enough of his time that he didn’t have to think about it too much. They directed him into intensive training for a recon unit, with an eye toward testing him out for Spec Forces if he did well. Spec Forces was four months of hard training, and you had to be selected for it. Kes was just as glad not to go straight into that sort of thing. Recon sounded more his speed than infiltration and combat, and it involved enough of the stuff he was good at that he was likely to enjoy it.

No more pretending to be someone else in high-pressure situations for at least a little while, too. That first experimental mission had been plenty of stress, and he knew they wouldn’t give him a rewarding one that let him talk to his wife again, so it wouldn’t be worth the pressure. So, recon it was, and he started training right away.

The wilderness survival stuff was a cakewalk, but pleasantly absorbing; much of it was on Yavin IV, and he discovered that he loved everything about the planet. Codes and signals stuff was similarly easy, enough like what he’d been raised doing as a matter of course that it was no particular challenge. But he had to learn how to use weapons, and that was hard. He had a knife, he got Andor to give him one, because he’d grown up on stories of guerrillas with knives, and he’d also grown up with a utility knife that he’d spent a lot of time messing with as a kid. Knives, he knew how to use, but of course, those weren’t standard armament. They were a farmer boy tool, and a romantic story from the old resistance.

He’d never held a blaster, let alone fired one, and he disliked it intensely. Even just target practice took a lot out of him; the recoil jarred his shoulders, set his teeth on edge, and the blowback singed the hair off his arms a few times. And he couldn’t help but imagine a living sentient in the place of the targets, and sometimes his imagination fixated in horrific detail on what those blaster bolts would do to living flesh.

It was even harder because weapons training was the only thing he wasn’t exceptionally good at, and the others naturally teased him about it, because despite him trying not to be a jerk about it, he’d been pretty obviously finding the rest of the training easy, and most of the others had struggled. So they all thought it was fair game to needle him about his unsteadiness on the firing range, and he didn’t know any of them well enough to explain what his real problem was.

So he gritted his teeth, dug himself an even deeper hole into his psyche, and borrowed competence to get himself through. He was definitely going to break down at some point, he figured-- he was still having weird little dissociative episodes from the damage the interrogation droid had done to him, and this was only piling onto that-- but clearly, everyone here was struggling with something or other, so there was nothing for it but to borrow from a theoretical future to keep going, now.

He took every extra practice session they offered him, and in the end, scraped through with a good enough weapons score to make it onto the recon squad he’d been aiming for. And if he had to block out time every couple days to go sit and shake and stare at nothing, well, that was just what it cost. At least his mastery of the terrain on Yavin IV, which was their main base and the place they returned after the end of each training session, was such that he never had any trouble finding somewhere private to freak out.

On one early training trek, he stumbled across a particularly prepossessing clearing in the jungle, a pleasant meadowy sort of area that overlooked a lazy bend of a river, and he realized it was within two hours’ hiking from the base if you went directly. So he went back there sometimes in his rest shifts, and just to amuse himself, paced out where a complex of houses could go, and daydreamed fields and pastures and barns. It was comforting, but it was also sort of a torment.

His main source of real comfort in that time was the steady stream of compressed-but-watchable holos Shara sent him. As the others trickled in for the meeting on Alderaan, she made sure to have them all film little greetings for him, and he treasured them. 

They assigned him to a recon unit that had already served together a while, and he figured out right away it was kind of like joining a cargo-loading crew halfway through a season-- they’d get him up to speed, and they weren’t unfriendly at all, but they referred to him as That Fuckin’ New Guy and as a matter of course, gave him a hard time.

He first joined them when they were coming off a brief rest rotation, a couple of injured guys coming back out of the med bay to rejoin them. Kes had done his best to memorize everyone’s names, and the sergeant, a pleasant enough fellow called Derck who’d clearly been around the block a few times, had given him a run-down of what kind of missions they’d done before, and had assigned him to bunk with a big burly bear of a man named Tubar. 

Tubar eyed him. “Are the recruits really getting that much younger, or am I getting older that fast?”

It was a while since anyone had remarked on Kes’s youth; he supposed it was a good sign that he had recovered from the torture enough not to look like he was prematurely aged, or anything. But he doubted Tubar meant it as a compliment. 

“It’s all right,” Kes said mock-earnestly, “they weaned me from the bottle as part of my training, I can eat on my own now.”

Derck laughed. “When you’re so old your teeth fall out maybe he’ll chew your food for you,” he said. 

“As long as the crying doesn’t keep me up at night,” Tubar said. 

Kes didn’t have to feign grimness. “No promises,” he said. 

 

That first mission was a cakewalk; they landed on a planet, hiked for two days to reach their objective, ascertained that the site was in fact vacant and had not been used for the Imperial monitoring outpost that they’d suspected it might have been, camped there an extra day waiting for pickup, and then got extracted back out. Kes enjoyed the scenery-- it was a forested planet, cold but not freezing, with sweeping panoramas and some pretty plants, not a ton of wildlife. He also managed not to have audible nightmares that woke Tubar, apparently, but he did discover that Tubar tended to snore. He did well enough that they stopped calling him The Fuckin’ New Guy, at least, though it still resurfaced from time to time. He considered himself fortunate and didn’t worry about it. He had enough to worry about.

 

The second mission was rougher. They were still looking for that same Imperial monitoring outpost, on a neighboring planet, and they found it all right, and what’s more, it found them. There wasn’t much they could’ve done to avoid it. The ship that dropped them off clearly got picked up by the sensors as it left, and so a patrol came looking for them. The scouts’ sensors spotted the patrol heading for them, and they immediately sent out a ping to their backup and retreated to a defensible position, but there was only so well they could hide, and it took the Imperial patrol a mere matter of hours to close in on their location. They hadn’t expected a simple monitoring outpost to have that kind of patrol capability, but this one clearly was more than their intel had suggested it was.

“We could surrender,” Captain Wani said, as they watched the Imperial patrol on their crude sensor display. They were only a recon patrol. They had some armaments, but most of what they carried was sensor equipment. They weren’t prepared to fight. Everyone but Kes had seen combat before, but they still weren’t really prepared-- not for what the Imps might have at their disposal.

They’d retreated to a canyon, and had set up defenses at either end. The Imperial patrol was closing in; it wouldn’t be long before they were discovered. They couldn’t tell how big the patrol was, yet-- all they had were pings off their sensors and some readings off exhaust from whatever vehicle they’d brought here.

“No,” Kes said, and it was the first time he’d spoken to her that wasn’t in response to a direct question. He hadn’t meant to say it, but it came out. 

She looked at him levelly, calculating; he knew she knew his file. She was a hard-bitten middle-aged woman with years of service under her belt. She’d pressed Kes pretty intensively on the subject of how thorough his recovery from interrogation was, clearly worried he wouldn’t be mentally robust enough for the posting, but he knew Andor must have spoken to her at some point, because she’d dropped it. 

“Any other input?” she asked, looking around at the others. Most of them were assembled in the underhang where they’d set up an impromptu command center, except the scouts manning their crude sensor outposts. They didn’t have a lot of equipment here: a set of assorted-sized sensors, a monitor, two heavier guns and some light demolition equipment, but mostly what they had were their bodies and handheld blasters, and a few detonators. 

“I’d rather fight,” Tubar said. 

“Backup is at least four more hours out,” she said. “Probably more like six or eight, and I don’t know how much they’re bringing. We don’t know what these guys have. If they have walkers, we’re toast in about two hours even if we can take out this patrol. That’s how long they’d take to get reinforcements here from the outpost.”

“If they have TIEs, we’re dead in maybe twenty minutes,” said Erly, a young-looking man who’d been pointed out to Kes as the most recent other new guy. This was his sixth mission, but he’d done a stint as an analyst before that. 

“What does he know about Imperial captivity that we don’t?” asked Nella, one of the corporals, gesturing at Kes.

Everyone looked at Kes. He swallowed, hard, and cleared his throat. “I can tell you how to resist droid interrogation,” he said, “but speaking for myself, I’d rather get killed than do it again.”

“We don’t know that they’d accept a surrender,” Sergeant Derck pointed out. “They might just annihilate us anyway.”

“They’ll want to interrogate a survivor,” Kes said. He should shut his mouth, this wasn’t the time, but he couldn’t help adding, hoarsely, “I’ll do  _ anything _ not to be that survivor.”

“Should’ve gone into Intelligence,” Captain Wani said, “they give you suicide pills. Fine, we’re fighting. Dameron, you go back up Pankhel on the northward gun emplacement; whatever happens, they won’t capture you. But be sensible, yeah?”

“I don’t _ want _ to die,” Kes assured her, and went and took his place without listening to how she distributed the others. 

 

The patrol came in from the north end, and it was obvious they were going to stumble into that northward gun emplacement first. Pankhel and Udart were already set up, and held their fire for maximum efficacy, waiting until discovery was inevitable, but Kes talked Pankhel into letting him try something. She hadn’t been privy to the discussion inside, and Kes had only filled her in on the bare bones of it. 

“Are you sure?” she muttered. 

“No,” Kes said, smudging mud down the bridge of his nose-- part of the guerrilla’s story he’d been thinking of was that they’d smudged their faces with dirt so Xicul’s twin moons wouldn’t betray them in the dark, and as a child he’d always driven his mother crazy putting dirt on his face to play at stalking Troopers in the woods-- “but what do we have to lose?” 

“You’re nuts,” she said, “but I guess you’re not wrong.” 

“Count thirty then throw the rock,” he said. 

“They’ll be on us before that,” she argued.

He shook his head. “Count fast then, if you really think so. I just gotta get behind ‘em.”

The Imperial patrol was Stormtroopers, following the same deployment pattern as they all did. Kes got that the uniformity thing was their system and it worked for them but it was also the same shit his people had been studying how to resist since the Separatist conflict so it was kind of easy to predict what they’d do. He rubbed the mud across his cheekbones, thought of how his mother’s cousin Tati had always told the story the same way, and drew his knife. Nixi had kissed her children goodnight, and then she and her sister Buna had smeared their faces with their native soil, and had crept out into the woods to save their village.

Blasters made noise. Knives didn’t. And Stormtrooper armor was all made the same. Kes had never killed a man before, had never seriously contemplated it, but he was very good at cutting exactly what he aimed at with a knife. 

He slipped into the footsteps of the Trooper flanking the man carrying the sensor they were using to look for the Rebels, waited for Pankhel’s rock to clatter down the other side of the canyon and both Stormtroopers to turn to look at it. As they did, he slid the knife into the throat gap of the Trooper’s armor, pushed past the resistance and whipped it out again, then prepared to die. The gap had been precisely where Tati had indicated as she’d told the story; she’d gestured, demonstrated it on one of them, and had made all the kids repeat the gesture, and it was part of the story just like Nixi kissing her children goodnight, and there was no way the story was accurate, but the knife had gone in and Kes couldn’t believe it.

The Stormtrooper didn’t scream, and Kes didn’t die; the ‘trooper made an awful little shrill noise, and twisted down, flailing helplessly. Kes stared at him in disbelief for a fraction of a second that felt like forever. 

Improbably enough, the sensor man paused, turning his head, but there was no peripheral vision in those helmets; he was clearly not really paying attention to his surroundings. “Sevens,” the sensor man said, maybe impatiently; his voice was flattened by the helmet. “Will you quit tripping on tree roots.”

Kes didn’t wait for the realization; he was already on the man, knife hammered into that same throat gap, and the sensor man didn’t have time to make any more noise than his companion. 

Kes ripped the sensor man’s helmet off, not looking at his dead face, and bashed it open to pry out the comm unit. He could hear that the patrols were checking in in sequence. “-- fours, no change,” said a voice. Then there was an awkward silence. 

“GK-1949, report,” a voice said after a moment, impatiently. Silence stretched. “Four-nine, report!”

Kes shook the thing, and found the trigger to transmit. “-- sorry,” he said, purposely flattening his voice, stretching his mouth, and trying his damnedest not to have any kind of accent, “Sevens tripped. No change otherwise.”

He held his breath. He probably sounded like a moron. He’d never learned how to get rid of his accent, not really. Then a bored-sounding voice said, “Four seven three zero, no change. Are we changing up the pattern once we hit that canyon?”

“Negative,” the impatient voice said, “just point the sensors down. Four-nine, you take the west edge, Twenty-two hug the east edge.”

Nothing for it; Kes went back and pried the transmitter out of Sevens’ helmet, and lifted the sensor from 1949’s limp hand, and followed the path closest to what he figured the patrol had been planning to take. He went back toward the northward gun emplacement, and carefully kept the sensor pointed the wrong direction, waving the comm unit at Pankhel as he came close. 

“What did you,” she said, astonished. 

“Killed them both,” Kes said. “Then reported in as this one. Here, Udart, take the sensor and the comm. You’re GK-1949 and you say your number and ‘no change’ after Fours makes her report. Head that way, follow the west edge of the canyon.”

“Oh for real,” Udart said, wide-eyed, but he wasn’t in recon because he wasn’t quick on the uptake, and he took the comm and the sensor and headed off, after Kes’s brief explanation of the pattern and trajectory and that they were just going to rely on sensors to sweep the canyon. (Fortunately, Rebel recon patrols studied trooper manuals too, so there wasn’t much confusion about the troopers’ pattern.)

Kes went to intercept the next patrol. He wasn’t nervous anymore, he just had every single sense cranked up as high as it would go. It was probably adrenaline. He had Sevens’ comm unit to monitor traffic, so now he could hear the pattern of the patrols. 

“Twenty-two, no change,” said the next patrol’s Stormtrooper. “Seriously though is Sevens drunk?”

“No chatter,” said the formerly-impatient voice, who was clearly in charge. 

“Sorry,” Twenty-two said. His backup guy sniggered, out loud but not on comms, and Kes took the opportunity to kill him mid-laugh. He made an odd little choking noise, but Twenty-two didn’t notice it. Kes killed him next, but not cleanly; his knife skipped off something, maybe a collarbone, and blood sprayed out. Twenty-two made a horrible, not quiet noise, grabbing at him, punching him, flailing for his blaster, but he didn’t manage to hit the switch of his comm.

Kes stabbed him in the neck again, and he made a really awful noise but not as loudly. Meanwhile, Fours checked in, boredly, and Kes listened with half an ear as he wrenched the dying Twenty-two’s helmet off and finally cut his throat the rest of the way. 

“One nine four nine,” Udart said, a little too cheerfully, “no change.” 

There was a pause. Kes watched the light go out of Twenty-two’s eyes (Twenty-two had been a middle-aged man, dark-skinned, heavy-jawed, and Kes looked away), and wiped blood off his muddy face, then made himself get up and smash Twenty-two’s helmet for the comm unit. Apparently no one dared comment on Udart’s unexpected sunniness, because after a hesitation, the next patrol checked in. 

“Are you in that canyon yet, Four Nine?” someone asked. Kes heard them on the comm but also out loud, and hastily got off Twenty-two’s corpse; the next patrol in the pattern wasn’t far off. He’d taken too long here. Tati’s story had cautioned about that.

“I mean,” Udart said, “next to it.” 

“I’m on the east edge,” Kes said into Twenty-two’s comm, turning his head to muffle the noise and hopefully disguise the way his vowels always slid too thin and curled the wrong direction, clipping his consonants as short as he could manage. He’d never had much luck hiding his accent but he’d never really truly tried; it was such a commonplace accent it had never really mattered before. But Imps never spoke Iberican, never had accents.  

“Really point those sensors down in,” the guy in charge said. “We know they’re out this way, and if they’re sharp they might have dug in.”

“If they’re that sharp shouldn’t we go down into that canyon?” the person Kes could hear out loud asked. Kes couldn’t kill them mid-sentence without giving up the game, surely, but damn, he wanted to.

The one talking was the one in back, the one he’d have to kill first. Kes adjusted his grip on his knife. They’d see Twenty-two’s corpse in a minute, at least on the lead guy’s sensor. 

“We’ll go in on the way back by if we don’t pick them up in another thousand meters or so,” the guy in charge said. “Just keep up the pattern for now.”

“Acknowledged,” the talking guy said grudgingly, and Kes waited for his comm to click off and then killed him, making double-extra-sure his knife went in and didn’t catch on anything or bounce off. He died quietly, and Kes bounded up to kill the sensor guy too. The sensor guy turned, so Kes had to change his angle of attack, and there was a tense moment as the man went down, writhing and kicking and muffledly yelling, where Kes thought maybe the guy had toggled his comm on fast enough. But when all was finally still he yanked the comm unit out of the helmet and the patrols were boredly checking-in, so apparently not.

His streak was going to end at some point. There were twelve patrols of two, at least; Kes suspected one of them had more than two members, so the leader guy could coordinate the sensors. Probably had some kind of vehicle or droid or something too. If he stumbled on that one he was fucked. Or if he stumbled on one of the other two that had a woman checking in; his voice didn’t feminize well, and he hadn’t practiced it the way Norasol had practiced making her voice sound like a man’s on comms. 

“Twenty-two,” the leader guy said, “your sensor’s out of whack. Or are you out of position?”

Kes remembered he was currently Twenty-two. He’d left the sensor on the body. He’d have to either pick up both that sensor and the one at his feet and try to act as both of them, or keep onward and kill more Stormtroopers. 

“Lemme check,” he said into Twenty-two’s comm, to buy himself some time. He picked up the latest victim’s sensor. That was gonna get unwieldy. “Better now?” 

“No,” the leader said. 

“Weird,” Kes said, into Twenty-two’s comm. 

“Flaky pieces of shit,” said another voice. “Whack it on your shoe, Twenty-two.”

“Don’t whack it on your shoe,” the leader said wearily, “it’s precision equipment. Power-cycle it and see if it comes back up. Everyone else, hold your positions.”

That was fucking ideal. “Acknowledged,” Kes said, and sprang up, shoving Twenty-two’s comm in his left pocket, the guy he’d just killed’s comm in his right, and picking his bloody knife up gingerly in his right hand again. 

His own comm buzzed. “Dameron,” Wani said, “what the fuck are you doing.”

“Ask Udart,” Kes said, “I can’t talk right now,” and shoved his comm back into the holder at the back of his belt. He was running out of places to keep comm units. 

He wiped out another patrol without undue fuss. “I didn’t see that sensor power-cycle,” the leader said. 

“I did it,” Kes answered into Twenty-two’s comm, stretching his mouth to try and get the vowels shaped right. “Is the connection bad?” Their own struggle with getting their sensors set up in the canyon was pretty fresh in Kes’s mind, and he knew they used just about the same ones as the Imps. 

“Might be,” the leader said. “Cut the chatter, guys, this is important.”

Kes pitched his voice a little higher to sound like the chatty guy he’d killed two kills ago, or maybe three. “Should we just keep holding position?” he asked, using the comm from his right pocket. He very deliberately did not let himself go back and mentally tally how many people he’d killed, now, with his hands and this knife, which was really gory by now and needed cleaning. Probably would need sharpening too, he’d hit bone a couple times and that tended to ding up a knife’s edge. No, he wasn’t thinking about that.

There was a pause. The leader’s voice came back on with the tail end of a sigh. “You’d better,” he said. “All hold position, I’ll bring my group up to your location, Twenty-Two. We need all sensors functioning.”

That would bring the guy past all the patrols that Kes had killed, surely. Shit, shit, shit.

“Why don’t I come back to you,” Kes said into Twenty-two’s comm. “Then you can see if my sensor’s moving or not.”

There was a pause, and Kes hauled out his own, issued comm. “Guys,” he said urgently.

“Fuck’s sake, Dameron,” someone said, and he was pretty sure it was Corporal Nella, “there are fucking corpses everywhere, what the fuck are you doing?”   
“Not getting fucking captured,” Kes said, with more emphasis than he’d strictly intended to. 

“Yeahhh,” the leader said heavily on the Stormtrooper comm, “that would be easier. You’re cleared to break position and come back to me, Twenty-Two.”

“Acknowledged,” Kes said, making his way as fast as he could back to Twenty-Two’s corpse, and sensor. Meanwhile, into his own comm, he said, “Shit, is anybody else on the Imp comms?”

“We pulled a couple off of corpses up here,” Nella said. “What the fuck are you doing to them? There’s blood everywhere.”

“Knife,” Kes said. He bent over Twenty-Two’s body, then froze at movement ahead of him in the woods, but it was Tubar, with a repeating blaster and a stunned expression. 

“You’re a crazy motherfucker,” Tubar said.

Kes went limp in relief, so limp he lost control of his knees and wound up on the ground. “Scared the fuck out of me,” he said unsteadily. No, he didn’t have time for the shakes yet. He picked up Twenty-Two’s sensor, and powered it down. Tubar came closer, and Gannew was behind him. “Both of you come with me and ambush this leader guy before he calls in to headquarters.”

“No chatter,” said the leader on the Trooper comms, “Twenty-Two, I saw your sensor go dark.”

Kes picked up the correct comm, double-checking to be sure of it. “Yeah,” he said, “I just powered it down again, it registered that time?”

“Affirmative,” the leader said. “Were you in your original position, still?”

Kes glanced over at Tubar. “Ah,” he said, “no, I’m like, halfway back to you.”

Tubar sighed, and said, “Let’s go, then.”

They crept back through the woods toward the leader’s position, and Tubar quietly briefed the Captain as they went. Kes handed the sensor off to Gannew, who amused himself by turning it on and off at random intervals and pointing it various directions, occasionally shaking it violently, but carefully keeping it away from the canyon. There was assorted chatter on the comms, but none of it was alarmed. 

They came across another Stormtrooper patrol, and both the others looked expectantly at Kes, who steeled himself, gestured at them to stay where they were, and drew his knife. This was going to be tricky, though; since they weren’t moving, the two Stormtroopers were facing one another to talk. He couldn’t sneak up on one without the other seeing. 

In the story from his childhood, there had been two sisters, and one of them had distracted the Troopers while the other crept up to kill them. He didn’t trust his companions to know how to do that, though. And in the story, they’d been civilians, so the Troopers wouldn’t have been immediately alarmed to see them. He was just going to have to improvise, here.

He stalked silently around, then picked up a rock out of the scrub, waited until one of them was talking, and tossed it into the brush a few meters away. 

The one who wasn’t talking turned around to look, and Kes leapt up behind the talking one, shoved his knife in the armor neck joint, twisted and yanked and jerked the knife out to leap on the other one as he turned back around and started to pull his blaster out. Kes got the knife up under his helmet, and the Trooper went down trying to yell and struggling valiantly. It was a messy kill, but neither of the other two Rebels got involved, which Kes had been worrying about since they might make too much noise, and he pulled the man’s helmet off, finished him off, and went back to the first one, who was still flailing but was clearly on his way out.

Kes despatched him with another stab for good measure, then pried him out of his helmet too and smashed it for the comm. He had the sensor, and Kes picked it up and turned to Tubar.

Tubar and Gannew were both staring at him. “Who the fuck  _ are _ you?” Tubar asked. 

Kes wiped blood and mud off his face-- somebody’d popped him in the nose in their death throes, that was his own blood-- wiped his knife off on the mossy ground, and stuck it back in the sheath. “I’m not a fucking prisoner, is who I am,” he said. “Their armor’s designed for blasters, not stabbing.” He wiped his face again, then waggled the sensor. “I think I’ll shut this off. Might confuse things more.” He did so, and handed it to Gannew. “Don’t get ‘em mixed up.” He handed Gannew the former sensor handler’s comm, pried out of his helmet. “That goes with it. If they ask, you’re whoever the fuck that guy was.”

“Wish they had their numbers on ‘em,” Gannew said. “That’d make it easier.”

“You’re telling  _ me _ this,” Kes said. 

“What’s the plan? How many more of these are there?”

Kes thought too hard for a second about the heat of the blood drying on his hand, and shuddered. “Uh,” he said. “There were twelve patrols.” He squeezed his eyes shut for a second. “There are eight now. Er, seven.”

Tubar swore, sounding impressed or dismayed. “Figure the leader’s got more than two with him?”

“Yeah,” Kes said. “Given the pattern, he’ll be-- “ He sketched the shape in the air, laying out the remaining patrols-- some off to the east, most up to the north. “Probably in the rear, because he’d get the clearest sensor picture there.” 

There was chatter on the Stormtrooper comms. Shit, they wanted someone to check in, who was unresponsive. “Which one’s Honks?” Gannew hissed. 

“AKA HN-8456,” Tubar said. “I don’t know which comm that is.”

“Me neither,” Kes said. “Fuck. Damn it.” 

“One nine four nine, you’re closest to their sensor position,” the leader said. 

“Thank fuck,” Kes said, and on the Pathfinder comm, said, “That’s you, Udart.”

“Sure is,” Udart said, and over the Trooper comm said, “I didn’t hear anything weird, I’ll check it out.”

“Twenty-two,” the leader said, “can you put a little hurry on it?”

“Yessir,” Kes said.

Kes’s Pathfinder comm buzzed. “The leader’s in a walker,” Erly said, “I got it on sensor. What’s your plan?”

“Fuck,” Kes said, not into the comm. He hadn’t accounted for that possibility  _ at all _ .

“This repeater won’t take down a walker,” Tubar said. “Pankhel’s gun might.”

“Fuck,” Kes said again. “Udart,” he said into the Pathfinder comm, “can you stall, or something?”

“I was fixin’ to,” Udart said. “Gonna mess with the sensor here a bit.”

“Can we lure the thing within range of Pankhel’s gun emplacement?” Kes asked. 

“She’d need to get it in like, one shot,” Wani said. “Isn’t the whole point to keep them from radioing in?” But she didn’t say it was impossible, so they weren’t dead yet. Maybe.

“Yeah,” Kes said. “So we gotta get it  _ really _ in range for her so she can hit it clean.”

Gannew hissed, and Kes stuck the comm back in his belt; there was another patrol due up soon, on their left, and sure enough, a vocoder-tinny voice was faintly audible after just a moment of listening. 

“I can move this emplacement,” Pankhel said, quiet and tinny. 

“Prepare to do that,” Wani said. “If you can get a bead on that walker, it sounds like he won’t be moving as long as the others keep him distracted.”

“Twenty-two,” said the leader, “where the fuck are you?”

“Uhh,” Udart said, over the Trooper comms, “I think we’re good here, but are our sensors cutting out too? Mine keeps making the bloopy noise.” The sensors emitted a little error sound when they lost connection.

“You’re cutting out too,” the leader sighed. “Why isn’t Honks on comms?”

“I’ll ask him,” Udart said. On the Pathfinder comm, he said, “Do I gotta make something up, or is his comm still in his helmet?”

“I don’t know which one he is,” Kes admitted, very quietly. “We gotta go dark a sec, there’s a patrol right by us. Affirmative on moving that gun emplacement if you can, though, we’re gonna try to keep that walker where it is.”

“Twenty-two,” the walker said, but there was no help for it, Kes couldn’t answer right now. 

“I think we’re getting interference,” Udart said on the ‘Trooper comms. “He’s transmitting but I don’t hear anything on the comm. I’m standing right--” and he banged the comm so it made feedback.

“Status,” the leader said tightly. 

Kes took advantage of the tense moment to slip into position behind the distracted sensor guy of the next patrol; he was listening intently and facing back toward the leader, and his companion was doing the same. Kes killed them both, smoothly enough, maybe too smoothly. No, he wasn’t thinking about it.

“I had to back out of-- there’s a little dip here,” Udart said. “And like. I think there’s something in the rock that makes stuff go funny. I dunno.”

“That doesn’t sound like,” the leader said, and Kes powered down the sensor of the man he’d just killed. “Fuck, BV-4091, status?”

Kes had to bash the helmet open and pry the comm out, and it took long enough that the leader repeated his question. He gestured frantically, and handed the thing over to Tubal, who hadn’t been on the ‘Trooper comms yet. “You’re BV-4091,” he said.

“Thanks,” Tubal said drily. He looked down at the recently-deceased ‘Trooper, and said, “That’s a woman.”

Kes looked too. He’d been so focused on not looking at dead faces-- “Fuck,” he said.

“Get the walker to come to your position,” Captain Wani said. 

Kes and Tubal looked at each other. “Without sounding the alarm,” Tubal said. Kes closed his eyes for a second, and held out his hand.

Tubal gave him 4091’s comm back, and Kes hit the transmit button and waved it around wildly so it would make static. “-- hear me?” he finished in a thready voice. He couldn’t do high, but if he thinned it out enough, maybe.

“Status, Nine-one,” the leader barked.

“I’m okay,” Kes said, waving it as he spoke, “but you all sound awful?” He wasn’t sure how the hell that would sound over comms, but it was better than nothing. “I can’t-- hear you--” and he dropped the comm on the ground, then bent over and toggled off the transmit switch. Then he pulled Twenty-two’s comm back out of his pocket, and cleared his throat. “Hey I’m right by her position, I’ll take a look.”

“Negative,” the leader said. “Continue to me.”

Kes held down the transmit switch and shook the thing wildly. “-- hear you,” he said. “Say again?”

“Continue to me,” the leader said, louder.

Kes waved the thing around. “-- breaking up,” he said. “I’m just gonna-- check in on--” 

Udart came in. “Since Honks is OK, should I go see what’s happening to Twenty-Two and 4091?”

“Negative, negative,” the leader said. “Return to your position. Everyone, hold position!”

“Acknowledged,” said one of the ones Kes was pretty sure was actually still a Stormtrooper. 

“Check in, everyone,” the leader said. 

The first couple of patrols checked in, and then there was an awkward pause. Udart finally clicked his transmitter on and did something, probably waved it around, to generate static. There was a long silence. 

“Twenty-two?” the leader prompted. 

Kes hit the transmit button and rubbed the comm down the side of his trouser leg, then clicked off. He also power-cycled Twenty-two’s sensor.

Tubar’s comm buzzed. “He’s on the move,” Wani said. “Walker’s on the move. Headed to-- I’m not sure where you are, Kes, but I bet that’s it.”

“Closing in on my range anyway,” Pankhel said. 

“I hear it,” Kes said grimly. Well, felt it. It was more a tremor in the ground than an audible sound. It was terrifying.

“Hold position, everyone,” leader said. “We’re clearly getting interference. Nobody move, I don’t want to squash your dumb asses.”

“That walker better be the only thing with the range to comm their main outpost,” Erly said.

“We have no choice but to destroy it,” Wani said. “Hopefully he wasn’t checking in that regularly and it takes them a while to send another one out to check up on it.”

“Fingers crossed,” Kes said. He could really hear, not just feel, the thing now. “Hey, let’s just, uh, hide?”

He and Tubar and Gannew dragged all the bodies to the south sides of trees, so the walker, approaching from the north, wouldn’t be able to easily see them, and stuck the sensors next to them, and then retreated some distance, careful of neighboring patrols. The remaining ‘Troopers were making terse desultory conversation on the comms, not enough to get yelled at but enough to keep in touch. Udart occasionally obliged with a burst of static. 

There was another patrol nearby, and Tubar said, “Tell me how to kill them.”

Kes bit his lip. “There’s a gap in the armor,” he said. “They’re designed for blasters and shrapnel. A knife can get through if you aim it right.”

“Let me use yours,” Tubar said. 

Kes regarded him warily. “How many things have you killed with knives?” he asked. 

“I’ve been in a lot more fights than you,” Tubar said, affronted. 

“I’ll grant that,” Kes said, “I’d never killed a human before today, but I spent my whole life slaughtering livestock. How good are you,  _ specifically _ , with a  _ knife _ ?”

Tubar set his jaw dangerously. “I’m not a rookie, kid,” he said.

“I’m not disputing that,” Kes said, “but we might get out of this alive, and I’ve just done this successfully a bunch of times. Let me just-- do it once more, and I’ll show you on the bodies, and you can practice, and then you can do the next set.”

Tubar started to object and Gannew said, “He’s right, man, just-- let him do it.”

“Watch,” Kes said, “that jinxed me and I’ll fuck this up.” But he went around behind the patrol, who were both watching in the direction the walker was audibly approaching from-- it was one of the two-legged ones, the littler ones, not the giant all-terrain ones-- and killed the first one clean. 

The second one saw him and had time to go for her blaster, but Kes knocked her down and had gotten the knife in before she managed to get the weapon up. She fought, but didn’t get her comm triggered in time, and the vocoder flattened out her screams enough that no one seemed to hear her. Kes held her down while she bled out, using his longer arms to keep his face out of range while she punched him surprisingly hard for a dying woman, and pulled her helmet off to make sure she was dead when she finally stopped hitting him. 

“That was ugly,” Tubar said.

“It’s not pretty even when it goes well,” Kes said, winded, looking down at her wide-eyed dead face. She’d been young, copper-skinned, hair cropped short like the men, black hair, dark eyes, she looked a little like she could have been one of his people, and he’d stabbed her three times in the throat and she’d partly drowned in her own blood and it was a hideous mess. His hands were shaking. 

“Hey,” Tubar said, and put his hand on Kes’s shoulder. “Hey, kid.”

“I don’t like it,” Kes said thinly, despite himself. “It’s bad enough when it’s animals, I never liked-- I don’t like--” He stopped himself from talking, and made himself crouch down and clean the gory knife by shoving it into the dirt and then wiping the bloody mud off. He breathed in, let it out slowly, and stood up again, squaring his shoulders. His torso was numb with bruises where she’d hit him-- she’d hurt him, but not enough to stop him.

“I can make the shot,” Pankhel said. “Is everyone clear?”

“We’re clear,” Gannew said.

“Once she makes the shot, everyone come back in the canyon,” Wani said. “We can use sensors to find the survivors.”

“Acknowledged,” Kes said. 

The Stormtroopers were checking in again. Kes didn’t bother making static. “Fours?” the leader said. “Fours?”

That was who Kes had just killed. Fours was the young woman. He shivered. 

Pankhel’s heavy gun made its characteristic whoosh, and then thump, and then a fireball lit up the air just above the tree canopy, and faded out. 

“C’mon,” Tubar said, and they ran toward the fireball, close enough to watch the disintegrating hulk of the burning walker collapse, each of the two legs a different direction. No way a comm went out from that, but it might have had a beacon in the event of destruction. Then they ran for the canyon. 

Kes tripped, and slid and rolled down into the canyon floor. Erly caught him, and Kes let him haul him up to his feet. “Shit, you’re crazy,” Erly said. “How did you know to do that?”

“Report,” Wani said. 

“Walker seemed destroyed,” Kes said, pulling his collection of Stormtrooper comm units out of his pockets and handing them to her carefully. “There were twelve patrols, and all the ones on foot were in pairs. I eliminated four of the pairs.” He noticed dimly that his hands were shaking. “I-- four? Or five?” He couldn’t remember, suddenly.

“Seven,” Tubar said quietly.

“Plus the walker, so that means there are maybe five patrols left, which means ten people,” Wani said.

_ Fourteen people _ , Kes thought. _ That means you killed fourteen people, with your hands. _ For some reason he had to make himself think the number in Iberican. Fourteen. It was a lot. 

“Dameron,” Tubar said. 

“That’s fourteen people,” Kes said quietly. “That I--” He couldn’t say it.

“What did you do to them?” Erly asked.

Kes shuddered. 

“C’mere,” Tubar said, “come and sit down a sec. Let me clean the blood off you.”

“Get it off me,” Kes said, managing to keep his voice quiet but unable to keep the urgency out of it. “Get it--  _ off _ me.”

Tubar very, very gently wiped Kes’s face and hands with a wet handkerchief, taking unexpectedly tender care with Kes’s battered nose. “You’re okay,” he said. “We can get the rest of ‘em. I saw what you did too, I know the trick now. I’ll practice, Kes, you won’t have to do it all again.”

Behind him, or to one side, out of his vision somehow, Gannew was quietly explaining exactly what Kes had done. Kes focused on holding his hands still enough for Tubar to clean them, pouring water from his canteen over them and wiping them with the by-now sodden handkerchief. Kes closed his eyes so he wouldn’t have to see how the blood was under his fingernails. 

That was a mistake; in his mind’s eye, the implacable gleaming round expanse of the interrogation droid’s sensor loomed close, and whirred. He snapped his eyes open and looked at Tubar’s face, gasping in panic, teeth chattering in pure horrified terror. Was this real? Had this been a test? The question and the pain would come soon, surely--

He could hear blasters, now, not far away-- were they executing prisoners? Was he next? 

Where was he?

Tubar grabbed both of his hands and held them. “Dameron,” he said. “Dameron, stay with me, what’s wrong?”

_ Poe _ , Kes thought.  _ She named him Poe. You know that’s real, you wouldn’t have imagined that. That happened after you were released. You’re not still there _ . “Th-- th-- this-s-s- this-is is real,” he said to Tubar. “This is-- I really did this. We’re really here.”

“Yes,” Tubar said, furrowing his brow. Kes breathed in slowly, staring unblinking at Tubar as if he could tether himself to reality just by looking at him.

“The way Imperial interrogation droids work,” Kes said, so calmly it felt like someone else was saying it, “is by inducing very vivid and realistic hallucinations until you’re not sure what’s real or not. If it goes on long enough, most people wind up permanently unable to discern where reality begins. They told me I’m one of the rare ones who recovered but sometimes I’m not sure whether I did, or whether I’m still there and this is part of the interrogation.”

“I see,” Tubar said. “Could anything I tell you help?”

“Not really,” Kes admitted. “But I’m not going to close my eyes again, that was a mistake.”

“I guess I see why you were willing to go so far not to get captured again,” Tubar said. 

“Yeah,” Kes said. His teeth chattered again; he was shaking violently. Tubar had both of his hands. He tried to free one. “Can I-- in my pocket, I want to get--”

“Okay,” Tubar said, and loosened his grip on Kes’s hands. Kes freed one, and pulled his little holoviewer out of the inner breast pocket of his jacket, and managed to switch it on.

The holo of Poe they’d sent him sprang up, and he looked at it. “That’s real,” he said. “I wouldn’t have imagined that.” 

“That’s a  _ little _ little baby,” Tubar said. “Like, days old.”

“Poe,” Kes said, and it was enough. He breathed in, breathed out, and his teeth stopped chattering, and he looked for another long moment, then switched the holoviewer off.

“A relative of yours?” Tubar asked. 

“My son,” Kes said, and put the holoviewer away. “He wasn’t born yet when they were interrogating me so I know-- I know I have to have gotten away because I wouldn’t have imagined him.” 

It was less convincing, now, though, because the holo was so familiar now, and because he’d never seen the actual child. It was losing efficacy. But he didn’t have a better option. 

“How’d you get out?” Tubar asked. 

Kes shook his head slightly. “They let me go,” he said, “because they thought I’d lead them to--” He waved a hand. “Don’t-- ask me stuff, it’s-- I--” It was like being interrogated, but he didn’t want to say that, it sounded stupid.

“Sorry, sorry,” Tubar said. “Stars, of course-- sorry!”

Kes scrubbed his face with his hands, then shook his head, took a deep breath and let it out, then stood up. His knees were shaky, but held him. His ribs really fucking hurt and his nose was real goddamn sore, which actually sort of helped ground him. “Okay,” he said. “Okay, I’m-- I’m done freaking out. Okay.”

“You can sit a bit longer,” Tubar said, standing up next to him.

“No,” Kes said, and went to see what was going on.

Wani had sent out an organized patrol of twenty to mop up, and they’d already accounted for ten additional Stormtrooper kills, and tallied the existing dead; Kes had missed the whole thing. The next order of business, however, was that they were going to pack up, remove every trace of themselves, and run like hell to another canyon some distance away, so that the next patrol the Imps sent out wouldn’t have quite such an easy time of tracking them down. They added a layer of complexity by planting all the salvaged Stormtrooper sensors in another canyon in the opposite direction, and setting up Pankhel’s gun with a remote trigger. If all went well, that would give them enough time for their extraction. If it didn’t go well, they’d at least be in a moderately defensible position.

It meant hard travel, but nobody was injured, except that Kes’s nose kept bleeding. The bruises in his torso started to really hurt, too, where various of his victims had hit him as they’d fought back. Fours had done some real damage. He put his head down and kept up, glad he didn’t have to carry anything heavy. The pain was distracting enough that he didn’t have a lot of spare attention to think about the people he’d killed; all he got was occasional flashes of sensation, the way the knife had felt parting flesh, how it had sent a shock traveling up his arm whenever he’d hit bone. It made him shudder, but he could keep going.

He had to stop and throw up once, but no one seemed to see him, and it was thin enough that he didn’t figure there’d be much for a tracker to find.

They reached their objective, and the scanner Corporal Eida was carrying had picked up some comm traffic that indicated that the previous patrol hadn’t managed to send a comm to the main base. The main base wasted a good hour trying to raise the missing patrol, before despatching a follow-up.

“We don’t know what kind of follow-up it’s gonna be,” Wani said, a little out of breath from scrambling back along the line, “but even if it’s a spacecraft we still have at least a quarter-hour to get to shelter.”

They made the canyon without the scanners picking up anything else. Their backup was enroute, confirmed less than three hours out. “Don’t jinx it,” Tubar said, reading Gannew’s expression. “I know you were gonna say that we might actually make it out of this but don’t, because that would curse us.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” Gannew said. “I wouldn’t ever say a stupid thing like that. But what I was going to say,” he went on, and put his arm around Kes’s shoulders, “is that we’re still alive now because of this guy, so in case we don’t make it out, I just wanted to acknowledge that right now.”

“Yeah,” Pankhel said, “I don’t figure I’d’ve lasted five minutes if I’d opened fire on that patrol. That walker would’ve blasted me before I could see it.”

“All of us,” Tubar said. He clapped Kes on the back. 

“I appreciate the recognition,” Kes said, trying not to flinch-- Gannew had squeezed his bruised ribs unpleasantly hard-- “but I think maybe we have to get out of this mess for it to really matter, so let’s focus on that, huh?”

“You have to tell us how you knew where the weak spot in Stormtrooper armor is,” Gannew said. 

Kes nodded. “I’ll be delighted to give a class later, but I think we’d better focus on digging in, just now.”

Since they had time, they rigged camoflage netting over the most open part of the canyon, so that they wouldn’t be seen if any aircraft went over. It was all woven with material that would dazzle sensors, and they decked out all the equipment with it. 

Then they sat down to wait. It was plenty of time for the scouts who had gone to rig the other canyon to look like they’d gone there to get the job done and catch up to the rest of the patrol.

After a couple of hours, even though Kes had tried to stay limber, he was starting to get stiff and seized-up with bruising. He went to the medic, who felt his ribs with mild concern, pronounced him all right enough, and gave him the mildest possible painkiller to keep the swelling down. Then he went to the captain, and asked to be put in the next rotation of scouts who were patrolling to monitor the approach of the Imp backup. 

“I think you’d better let someone else have a chance to catch some glory,” Wani said, looking at him dubiously. “You can’t tell me you’re bored?”

“It’s a lot of pressure,” Kes admitted. Just sitting here waiting was setting everyone off, but almost all the others had had turns patrolling, so at least they were getting to move around. 

“I know it’s a lot of pressure,” Wani said, with a humorless laugh. “Don’t talk to me about pressure.” He wondered, for the first time, what she’d thought about this mission before they came out. But she was eyeing him, clearly assessing. “Are you trying to avoid having too much time to think about what just happened?”

Kes made a face. “Maybe,” he said honestly. “I don’t want to think it all through until I’ve had a chance to rest, you know?”

“Is that so,” she said.

“It seems better to keep moving,” he said. 

“You’re not wrong about that,” she conceded. “Listen, I just need one thing. Who the fuck are you and how do you know so much about Stormtrooper armor?”

“Seconded,” Corporal Eida said. Kes had been trying to make this a private conversation, but this canyon was smaller than the other one, and they were crammed in.

Kes shook his head. “I’m a cargo loader,” he said, but even as he said it, Kes the cargo loader seemed like a long-dead person from an old story. Whoever he was now, his tunic front was entirely covered in a pattern of various-sized dots and splats of blood and mud.

Eida’s scanner made a blatting sound, and she adjusted it. “That’s our ride,” she said. “Almost in range.”

Erly, at another of the scanners, looked up grimly. “And that’s the patrol’s backup, just discovering the wreckage at the other canyon.”

They collectively held their breath as they waited to see whether the Imp patrol would take the bait and go to the decoy canyon. It was a while, and Kes started to really suffer from his adrenaline letdown. He kept dissociating, sliding off into not being present, and he knew it was exhaustion but it was harder each time to ground himself when everything around him was so tense and suspenseful.

The patrol took the bait. They’d left a pressure-plate trigger on a grenade, and their sensors picked up the grenade going off, and then a whole lot of blaster fire. That went on for a good long while, and Kes crowded around Erly’s listening post with the others, hanging onto Gannew’s arm and with Tubar’s hand on his shoulder, and it was better, he could stay focused. 

“We should’ve set up a second level though,” Pankhel said, as they listened to the faux-battle raging on at the other canyon. “Like, a second decoy position. We had enough time.”

“It’s too late now,” Wani said. “Either our time will run out or it won’t.”

The faux-battle petered out as the Imps realized there was no more resistance. Now it was time to see how long it took them to find the real patrol. 

“When you said our ride was  _ almost in range _ ,” Wani said. 

“Their priority’s gonna be the Imp monitoring station,” Erly said. “They’re headed there first.”

“Of course they are,” Wani said after a pause. 

It didn’t really matter. But the suspense was climbing. The Imps were doing a regular search pattern, or so it seemed from what little their sensors could pick up. It would take some time for them to--

“Starcraft,” Eida said, tapping the sensor monitor. Something was flying within the planet’s atmosphere straight toward-- no, toward the Imp patrol. 

“Ours?” Gannew asked hopefully.

“Negative,” Eida said. “Fuck, they sent fighters when they found the destroyed walker. They’ll find us in no time.”

Kes couldn’t understand the sensor data, so he wriggled out toward the back of the crowd. He was hallucinating again-- little things, the IT-0 droid’s whine kept creeping up in the back of his mind, sometimes he had repetitive vivid flashes of his knife cutting flesh, sometimes he felt the vibrations in the ground of an approaching walker, the way it had felt out there when the thing had come toward them. 

He steadied himself against the canyon wall, then sat down, putting both hands flat on the ground. He could feel the walker approaching. It couldn’t be, it couldn’t be.

He couldn’t stop feeling it, so he got up and grabbed Tubar’s arm. “Humor me,” he said.

“Okay,” Tubar said. 

“Put your hands flat on the ground and tell me what you feel,” Kes said. 

Tubar sat down next to him, and put his hands on the ground. Now Kes couldn’t feel anything either. “I feel dirt,” Tubar said. 

“Hold on, I want to see if it happens again,” Kes said. 

“What are you doing?” Udart asked. 

Kes shook his head slightly, hands pressed to the ground. There. “That,” he said. “Did you feel that?”

Tubar shook his head. “What am I trying to feel?”

“Vibrations,” Kes said. “Maybe I’m crazy. There, again.”

Udart sat down next to him. “What are we doing?”

“Do you feel any vibrations,” Kes asked, self-conscious now because several other people were watching them, including Captain Wani.

“Vibrations,” Udart said thoughtfully. “No.”

“Vibrations like what?” Tubar asked.

“Like,” Kes said, and stopped. Everyone was looking at them. “Never mind.”

Udart kept his hands pressed against the ground. “Really, though,” he said, “like what kind?”

“I don’t feel it now either,” Kes said. “Never mind, I think I was just--” He stopped dead as he felt it again, but Udart’s expression didn’t change. 

“I don’t feel anything,” Tubar said. 

“I must be hallucinating,” Kes said quietly, picking his hands up and dusting them off. “I’m-- never mind, I’m sorry.”

Wani was looking at him, and he couldn’t look at anybody. If they thought he was too unstable for fieldwork they’d give him a desk job and then he’d have to explain to them that he had trouble reading, and it was going to be awful and embarrassing. As it was he was going to have to do some fast talking about having gone apparently berserker with a knife. That wasn’t going to go over well in an after-action report, he rather thought. Clearly, none of them had ever heard the stories he’d grown up with, and thought he was just an inspired psychopath.

“Oh holy shit,” Udart said, “I did, I felt-- just now?”

Kes gritted his teeth. “Yes,” he said.

“It’s the walker,” Erly said. “The second patrol’s walker, I bet. It’s coming this way.”

“Fuck,” Udart said.    
“I don’t feel anything,” Tubar said, alarmed. 

“I’m surprised you two can,” Erly said, “but it’s on the way.”

Kes scrambled to his feet, and they all divided themselves, some heading out to man the remaining gun emplacement, some to try to use grenades for distraction. Once they were out of cover they’d be easy for the starcraft to pick up; there were three, flying a search pattern, and they’d probably found something because they’d apparently told the walker to come this way and were tightening their search direction. 

“Any bright ideas now?” Tubar asked Kes as they climbed carefully out of one of the canyon’s side cuts. 

Kes shook his head. Through the painkiller, his sore ribs were bleeding through, and it was making it hard to climb. He felt sort of stupid for worrying about a desk job. They’d get this outpost eliminated, sure, but this recon team wasn’t going to make it back. He’d just killed fourteen people for nothing. He was gonna make sure he wasn’t captured, though.

“I can feel the vibrations, finally,” Tubar pointed out.

Kes shook his head again. It didn’t matter. It didn’t matter. None of it mattered. 

Tubar stopped trying to talk, and they took up their positions and waited. 

To the south, someone fired a blaster. It was met with a hail of answering fire, and the Rebels’ surviving large gun went off. 

“Well, that’s it then,” Kes said. Even with the camoflage, the spacecrafts’ sensors would be able to pick up the emissions where the gun had gone off, and use that to target them. 

“Nice knowing you,” Tubar said. “Good work back there, we almost made it because of you.”   
Kes let his breath out and watched the walker appear, its head cresting above the trees of the horizon. “There it is,” he said. He aimed his blaster, squinting; it was possible to score a critical hit on one of those things with a handheld blaster, but a barely-passable marksman like Kes wasn’t going to be the one to do it, and certainly not from this range.

He fired anyway, and the walker exploded immediately. They both scrambled down for cover as a shockwave rolled out across the area.

“Holy shit,” Tubar said, or something like it, Kes couldn’t hear him. He looked at Kes. Kes’s vision was all dotted with greened-out ghost images from the explosion. “Did you do that?” 

Kes shook his head slightly, and then motion caught his eye: an X-Wing, coming in on a strafing run. He pointed, and Tubar hauled him down into the canyon for shelter. The ion cannons on those things were no fucking joke, and the pilot wouldn’t know they were there.

They both lay there a moment as the X-Wing screamed overhead, then scrambled up and back to their places. Looking straight up, the X-Wing was dogfighting with one of the TIEs, and won, the TIE tumbling off into the distance and landing somewhere over the horizon in a lightning-like explosion. 

“I think we’re saved,” Tubar said, but Kes couldn’t really hear him.

  
  



End file.
